Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Artist Info

Wilfrid Scawen BluntSussex, England, 1840 - 1922

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79145387

Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen (1840–1922), hedonist, poet, and breeder of Arab horses, was born at Petworth House, Sussex, on 17 August 1840, the second son of the three children of Francis Scawen Blunt (1790–1842) of Crabbet Park, Poundhill, and Newbuildings Place, Southwater, Sussex, and his wife, Mary (1806–1855), daughter of John Chandler, squire and rector of Shipley, Surrey. The Blunts had been Sussex landowners for 300 years, and what Wilfrid called the ‘manly’ side of his nature came from his Sussex background (‘Secret memoirs’). His widowed mother sent Wilfrid and his elder brother, Francis, aged seven and eight, away to Twyford preparatory school, where they were always hungry, scavenging for nuts and orange peel on the downs. Why did they not complain? Like all ‘oppressed peoples’, Wilfrid wrote, they did not realize that their misery could be alleviated by radical change. For the rest of his life Wilfrid knew which side he was on—that of the weak.

In 1851 Blunt's mother joined the Roman Catholic church, taking her children with her. She died of tuberculosis when Wilfrid was fifteen. During his education at Stonyhurst and Oscott colleges, Blunt spent his holidays in Surrey with Henry Currie, the banker—his guardian and great-uncle—or in London with his other guardian, Lady Leconfield, and his fashionable Wyndham cousins. If his world politics were to be radical, his domestic creed was always tory.

Blunt entered the diplomatic service in 1858, serving for eleven years in Europe and South America as secretary of legation. At Athens (1859) he bought an ancient white stallion and galloped about, feeling himself a Byronic hero (his father had fagged for Byron at Harrow School). At Frankfurt (1860) the young attachés argued over the problems of Charles Darwin and his evolutionary theories, rather than Schleswig-Holstein, and Blunt's religious faith was shaken. At Madrid (1862) he took a mistress, Lola, who encouraged him to practise bull fighting, and in Paris (1864) he nearly captured the ambassador's daughter. In Lisbon (1865) he became close friends with Robert Lytton, the future governor-general of India, but on holiday in Bordeaux he ‘enjoyed the least decent period’ of his life (‘Secret memoirs’) as the young lover of Catherine Walters, the notorious courtesan Skittles. They revelled in each other's beauty; Wilfrid had chestnut hair and dark, flashing eyes. This affair led to a variety of romances, some of them celebrated in Blunt's poetry (Skittles was Esther in his Sonnets and Songs by Proteus, 1875). A critic whom John Murray, Byron's publishers, consulted about publishing Blunt reported that his poetry was of a vintage ‘truly of the grape, not of the gooseberry’ (Longford, 104). In Buenos Aires (1867) Blunt had a half-Indian mistress, Anita, and at Bern (1869) it was the wife of a prominent English resident who seemed to be his long-sought ideal love. He was to become a self-confessed hedonist, writing in old age,

Pleasure is duty, duty pleasure

In equal measure.

(Poetical Works, 2.8)

But though he declared that love was to him what a dram was to a drinker, he later pursued only liaisons that were compatible with his social position. That meant no more Lolas or Anitas, but was to involve, embarrassingly, several of his relatives.In 1869 Blunt began a vita nova, and on 8 June married Byron's granddaughter, Lady Anne Isabella Noel King (1837–1917) [see Blunt, Lady Anne Isabella Noel, suo jure Baroness Wentworth] daughter of William, first earl of Lovelace, and Ada Byron. Now a rich man, Blunt left the diplomatic service, his marriage seeming to underline the Byronic traits in his character. The death of his brother and beloved sister Alice from tuberculosis in 1872 destroyed his last vestiges of religious faith, but left him squire of Crabbet Park and Newbuildings. Next year the Blunts' only surviving child was born, Judith Anne Dorothea. Soon afterwards the couple departed on the desert travels that were to build their joint reputations for courage and expertise. After riding through Turkey, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Arabia, with a visit to the Lyttons at Simla, they founded their admired Crabbet Arabian stud, having purchased in Aleppo in 1878 the pure-bred Arab stallion, Kars, for £69. In the same year Blunt published Proteus and Amadeus, a religious dialogue in which Proteus (Blunt) asked, ‘Has God got a smell?’ His publisher changed ‘smell’ to ‘scent’.

At forty Blunt had entered full manhood—according to his analysis, youth being for feeling, age for meditation, and manhood for battle. In England he began another vita nova, this time in active politics, his aim being to make England liberate and regenerate Islam. He met the prime minister, W. E. Gladstone, whom he tried to interest in an Arabian, instead of an Ottoman, caliphate. When next in Cairo in 1881, the Blunts bought the exquisite little estate of Shaykh ‘Ubayd, and when the Egyptian nationalist leader, Arabi Pasha, seized the khedive Tawfiq's palace in a bloodless revolution against the Turks, the Blunts and their Irish friend Lady Gregory returned to London to put Arabi Pasha's case. Blunt was able to use his diplomatic contacts and his friendship with E. W. Hamilton, Gladstone's private secretary, to gain access to the prime minister. Initially he had considerable success in persuading Gladstone to pursue the goal of ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’, but other forces prevailed; by May 1882 Hamilton felt that ‘Blunt and all his enthusiasm for the “National” party in Egypt has been shown up’ (Gladstone, Diaries, 10.lxviii, n.). Blunt became persona non grata in Downing Street, Alexandria was bombarded, Egypt occupied, and Arabi exiled. But rarely has an anti-imperialist come so close to preventing an imperialist act. When Blunt denounced European imperialism, he was in turn denounced as only another Arabi in a frock coat. Banned from Egypt, Blunt retaliated by publishing The Wind and the Whirlwind (1883), a poem that depicted the British empire's fall:

Thou hast thy foot upon the weak. The weakest

With his bruised head shall strike thee on the heel.

Blunt revisited India in 1883–4, writing Ideas about India (1885) and preaching reform; but an Arab horse he bought and called Reformer died. Also in 1885 he stood for parliament as a tory democrat supporting Irish home rule, and was defeated in Camberwell North. His vanquisher, wrote Blunt, would do no good but simply show off as an MP among his ‘fellow grocers’ (‘Secret memoirs’). He fought Kidderminster for the Liberal home-rulers in 1886, but lost by 285 votes. He even dared to take the chair at a political meeting in Sussex for a Liberal, thereby causing tory friends to boycott his literary Crabbet Club and annual tennis weekend. On 25 October 1887 he chaired an anti-eviction meeting in Woodford, co. Galway, that had been expressly banned by Arthur Balfour, the Irish chief secretary, whose new Crimes Bill was designed to crush home rule. Blunt was arrested, tried, and imprisoned, first in Galway gaol then in Kilmainham, Dublin, from 3 January to 6 March 1888. Meanwhile he stood as an anti-coercion candidate for Deptford, losing by 275 votes. In 1889 he published a prison sonnet sequence called In vinculis (‘In chains’).

Blunt's friend Oscar Wilde said that Balfour's act had changed Blunt from a clever rhymer into a deep-thinking poet. Wilde and George Curzon both attended the Crabbet Club weekend in 1891, conducting a ferocious verbal duel after dinner. At dawn the younger guests dived into the lake before playing nude tennis, Blunt, sitting cross-legged and dressed in pink and green pyjamas, watching impassively from Anne's bedroom balcony. Blunt took his revenge on Balfour when, in an exotic seduction in the desert, he made his cousin Mary Elcho [see Charteris, Mary Constance], Balfour's Egeria, his ‘Bedouin wife’ when she visited Blunt at Shaykh ‘Ubayd (‘Secret memoirs’). As a result, Mary had a daughter by Blunt, Mary Pamela Madeline Sybell Charteris (1895–1991), and a son by her unfaithful husband, in consecutive years. The nineties saw Blunt's hedonism in its last and most extravagant phase, when he could name as the objects of his romance women such as Lady Gregory, the virginal Margot Asquith, Lady Blanche Hozier (though Blunt was not the father of Clementine Hozier, later Churchill), Lady Margaret Sackville, and Dorothy Carleton (Percy Wyndham's niece).

Blunt kept a diary for much of his adult life, parts of which he published in The Secret Occupation of Egypt (1907), India under Lord Ripon (1909), Gordon at Khartoum (1911), and My Diaries (2 vols., 1919–20). The diary, which itemizes Blunt's sexual exploits in considerable detail, including the names of his conquests, was deposited in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; it was opened in 1972, fifty years after his death, and forms a chief source for A Pilgrimage of Passion (1979) by Elizabeth Longford.

Old age and the new century brought ill health rather than meditation. In 1906, after Blunt installed his nurse, Miss Lawrence, at the head of his table and adopted Dorothy Carleton as his ‘niece’, his long-suffering wife, Anne, left him and the stud was divided. In 1910 he refused a prostate operation, influenced by Bernard Shaw's Doctor's Dilemma. An invalid throughout his last twelve years, he counted among his friends the Bellocs, the Winston Churchills, Roger Casement, St John Philby (father of Kim), the Meynells, the dying Francis Thompson, Father Vincent McNabb, and a group of important young poets. On 18 January 1914 a peacock was culled from the Newbuildings flock for roasting and Blunt was entertained in his famous Arab robes at the Peacock Dinner (lunch) by, among others, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Richard Aldington. Blunt was the first poet, they agreed, to relate poetry to real life; Pound wrote of his ‘unconquered flame’ (Longford, 406).

Lady Anne died in Egypt of dysentery on 15 December 1917, having (by his account) been reconciled with Wilfrid in May. But her will was disputed; a bitter lawsuit followed over the stud's ownership, which Blunt lost to his daughter, Judith, and her children, Anthony, Anne, and Winifred Lytton, in 1920. Wilfrid and Judith made peace a month before his death at Newbuildings Place on 10 September 1922. Buried in his own Sussex woods, he was acclaimed by E. M. Forster for My Diaries as ‘an English gentleman of genius’ and ‘enfant terrible’ of politics (Longford, 418).

Blunt had struck reverberating blows against imperialism. His most memorable line of poetry on the subject comes from Satan Absolved (1899), where a cynical devil explains to the Almighty that, ‘The white man's burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash’ (Poetical Works, 2.254). Blunt thus stands Rudyard Kipling's familiar concept on its head, arguing that the imperialists' burden is not their moral responsibility for the colonized peoples, but their urge to make money out of them.

Elizabeth Longford

Sources

W. S. Blunt, ‘Secret memoirs’, FM Cam. · E. Longford [E. H. Pakenham, countess of Longford], A pilgrimage of passion: the life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1979) · Earl of Lytton, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: a memoir (1961) · E. Finch, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, 1840–1922 (1938) · W. S. Blunt, My diaries: being a personal narrative of events, 1888–1914, 2 vols. (1919–20) · W. S. Blunt, The poetical works of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: complete edition, 2 vols. (1914) · W. S. Blunt, The land war in Ireland: being a personal narrative of events (1912) · N. Lytton, The English country gentleman (1925) · M. Egremont, The cousins: the friendship, opinions and activities of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and George Wyndham (1977) · J. Wentworth, The authentic Arabian horse (1945) · Gladstone, Diaries · d. cert. · personal knowledge (2004)